After a month of waiting, both the boy’s and girl’s cross country teams finally got a chance to compete in their first race of the season, and they did not disappoint. This past Thursday at the Eagle-Crusader invitational at Mcnair Park, the girl’s squad placed 8th overall out of 19 teams while the boys received 2nd place out of 18 teams.

The top five girls all finished within 20 seconds of each other with senior Annessa Shively leading the way in 34th place with a time of 22:39.

“It was great to run a real race with everyone and we ran way better than we were expecting, which we were all super happy about. At one point in the race there were like 5 of us running together, and that motivated us all to keep going. We work really well together as a team and I think we have a good chance of doing well at districts,” said Shively.

The boys looked extremely strong in the race as well. The seniors led the way with the top four finishes: Colin Ring, finished 4th overall, Hayden Turley finished 8th, Hunter Freiner finished 14th, and Thomas Gorline finished 17, all out of more than 200 runners. Senior, Caleb Moellenhoff, who had been out since 2018 with a hamstring injury, also ran well in his first meet in over 20 months, finishing in 20:25 – an exceptional time considering that he has had very little training.

“It was a pretty gratifying experience to have guys like Caleb and Hunter return to run competitively with the rest of the team again (both had been out with injuries). Personally for me, I was extremely happy that I was able to go as fast as my fastest time from last season, but that joy was only amplified when I remembered that I was doing it with the entire boys team,” Turley said.

Turley tied his personal record with a time of 17 minutes and 23 seconds for the 5k.